They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.
They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.
That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up.
I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.
What modern consumer-facing companies have come out of the EU in the past 20 years, besides Spotify? How is that list looking compared to the US?
That's all the evidence you need that the EU has seriously fucked up with regards to encouraging tech innovation.
A lack of tech innovation has terrifying implications for the EU long-term, such as reduced QoL, brain drain, economic decline, etc. - all of which are already in progress.
Majority of educational software is European. That list above is missing Duolingo. A giant undoubtedly. Hey, did you know Gitlab was European, too? Or Skype? Or Waze? Or Booking.com? Or Skyscanner? Or even flightradar?
When the EU's biggest competitor to Apple, Google, and OpenAI is Spotify and Booking.com, there's a serious problem with the EU.
It shows that the region is barely capable of encouraging innovation that will meaningfully advance technological progress, which is the single biggest predictor of quality of life in human history.
Yes, the EU might be nicer to work in, more vacation days, less layoffs. Such a view is shortsighted and does not consider how suffocating innovation impacts humanity long-term, because your 15 extra vacation days simply will never measure up to the literal humanity-changing advancements technology provides.
In essence, you have improved QoL today but sacrificed it for generations to come, because your region has decided that it's not important to craft regulations that balance entrepreneurial spirit with consumer good. Ask any startup how difficult it is to deal with GDPR, I have literally seen startups give up over this.
(Is GDPR good for consumers? Of course. Was it designed with literally any feedback from people interested in starting a business? No.)
Perhaps the US has too far on one side, but the EU has clearly gone too far on the other. And the EU can continue to freeload off the US's advancement, but if the EU's current model were to become global, there's precedent that human innovation would grind to a standstill.
I have one of the same model. WiFi connection doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried every troubleshooting article I could find, to the extent of setting a static IP for it in my router. Otherwise a great printer, but that issue did leave a bad taste in my mouth
But if the work can be done fully remote, why does the person need a visum to be in the US? Why not work remote from abroad without visa requirements and probably with lower cost of living?
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